Gray Body Text Is Non-Optimum, Try This:

A number of developers and designers have gotten the idea that having dim text is the way to go. And I can see for a number of youth that stares on the screen all day long it might be annoying, even infringing. Especially if you sit in a dimly lit room where the only light comes from the monitor(s).

May I make the suggestion that black on white is not my first choice either, but rather than making it hard to read for a good percentage of people, use a different color, for example, a blue.

Blue would immediately change the impact to those with sensitive eyes. Not to say that dimming the monitor would create the same effect across the board.

It appears that too many developers are not fully considering who their public might be. Which of course also applies to any designers that use the same.

Now, I’m not at all totally against using gray to separate a section of text, or copy for marketing people. It does not require much change to stand out either, as you saw there.

How about a site function where you can store the color value in a cookie ensuring everyone can read it the way they like! Much like we can often choose different languages. Which is very handy when traveling to a country with a language you are not fluent in.

Point being making websites available for as many as possible is the goal for most websites wanting maximum return on investment, by attracting people with all kinds of eyesight on normal monitors. I’ve yet to try this out on the new 4K monitors, but I’d bet it is still true.

We have come a long way in making the web a universal tool that everyone can use, lets not go backwards by making it hard for a good swath of the population.